HN user
Georgios Petronius, self-employed, engineer, small business owner.
I never dismiss anyone's claims. I simply say that if there's evidence that you have - let us see that evidence. But assertions are often made not only without any evidence being offered but without anyone even asking for evidence.
Do the anti-DST people understand what they're advocating for?
They do, which is why only 45 countries observe DST.
25 observe it partially.
And the rest, roughly ~125 countries do not.
Historically, ~140 countries did.
To put this into perspective, only about 1.2B people out of 8.3B observe it today. Which puts you into a very small <15% minority.
The government? Or your government?
Because there are countries where national or state governments do.
formalize these 20 pages of requirements, death by powerpoint style, and put it in our suggestion box - I just pass on that.
Why pass on it now? There has never been a better time in history to deal with it than today: AI can oneshot most of what you've described.
$20/kg is a wild claim.
A typical American semi-truck (18-wheeler) can carry between 40,000 and 45,000 pounds (20 to 22.5 tons) can travel only 160k miles (2/3 distance to the Moon) on a budget of $400k (i.e. $20/kg).
Do you expect us to believe that rocket transportation would be in the ballpark of truck prices in the near future?
You're right about reason #1. And you've probably heard about strong contenders for #2 and #3.
There's a famous quote attributed to the Italian military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in 1499.
When asked by King Louis XII of France what preparations were needed to invade the Duchy of Milan, Trivulzio responded: "To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money."
You're thinking of a perfect world. We're not in it.
In this one there are often thousands of applicants for a position, most of which can't pass FizzBuzz.
Why would they (or anyone for that matter) choose a candidate who can't figure out how to find info about a trivial method?
No worries. My point is, if you get asked questions that seem simple to the point where you feel they're asking if "water is wet", then you need to keep your own thinking process extremely simple in response.
The reason is the intent behind their question, which they don't vocalize.
This question means we are dealing with an extremely broad hiring funnel designed to fail people who can't FizzBuzz and need to keep answers at MVP level.
In other words, if you are asked to put out a fire use a bucket of sand, not a state-of-the-art fire extinguisher.
It's simple, unless you're given a specific broader context (like we have an enterprise customer data pruning system that needs to handle a broad range of corner cases) then you must not resort to overengineering this early in an interview.
No, there's literally a "find" str method.
str.find(sub[, start[, end]])
"Return the lowest index in the string where substring sub is found within the slice s[start:end]. Optional arguments start and end are interpreted as in slice notation. Return -1 if sub is not found."
Your instinct to resort to "in" is correc,t as it's generally slower than the "in" membership test, but the interviewer has even allowed the use of Google. Blanking out after that is really bad.
I don't understand how you jumped to the membership test instead of literally the .find() method on a string?
The interviewer is not asking to solve a problem here, they're asking for a simple ability to follow instructions, hence the offer to use Google to find the correct answer.
You could make a very solid case for using "in" (it is 2-4x faster), but only after you've solved the task at hand, this is what is expected in interviews. Not knowing the interview meta makes an average Joe basically unhireable in this market.
Step 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=list+python+string+methods
Step 2: Parse the output with your eyes. The method is literally called "find".
This one-trick pony failure mode could perhaps have been fine for a guy who did Java and nothing but Java for 10 years, but you are supposedly the person who runs "pythonforengineers" website...
100% correct call by the interviewer.
You mean the same Anthropic, that wouldn't blink an eye at intentionally overcharging users hundreds of dollars just for having a HERMES.md file in a repo, would be above taking your data for... ethical reasons?
What's stopping you from making the trivial adjustment to the original question: "Who is the next likely person after Satoshi Nakamoto to have authored this"?
Comma placement isn't really part of the language; it's part of the education system.
Interestingly, LLMs disagree with you.
Your statement is only accurate in an extremely narrow case, like if you were there to hear the person speaking, before their speech which was transcribed. Obviously, it is not true for almost all of human writing.
And if you were to go commaless, you will quickly get to rather precarious sentences, such as this one:
"Let's eat grandma."
A comma is the natural fix:
"Let's eat, grandma."
The example you've provided just adds noise.
sha256 is deterministic, LLMs are not, even at temperature set to 0.
For Jevons paradox to be a win-win, you need these 3 statements to be true:
1)Workers get more productive thanks to AI.
2)Higher worker productivity translates into lower prices.
3)Most importantly, consumer demand needs to explode in reaction to lower prices. And we're finding out in real-time that the demand is inelastic.
Around 1900, 40% of American workers worked in agriculture. Today, it's < 2%.
Which is similar to what we see with coding: The increase in demand has not exploded enough to offset the job-killing of each farmer being able to produce more food.
Who even is the deep state any more?
The same thing it's always been: The military-industrial complex.
MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats.
It's not that hard to distinguish "them", just look at how fast the mainstream media threw Biden under the bus over Afghanistan withdrawal.
1)POTUS orders the withdrawal.
2)Generals botch the withdrawal on purpose.
3)Mainstream media (left and right) eviscerates the POTUS. This sends a strong message to this POTUS, as well as any subsequent Presidents: "Don't mess with the profits of the complex or else."
This was the tipping point for me when I realized that the deep state is not a just a bogeyman conjured up by the right wingers. Should you cross the complex, it will just as easily come for you even if you're a Democrat that's been in politics for 50 years.
Finally, the Atlantic is as establishment as it gets. No matter which party is in power, their editorial board serves the ruling class, of which almost nobody on HN is a part of.
Whether their interests align with yours or not you can ascertain just by looking at approval ratings of the US Congress.
Yes, they do. OGs remember that Facebook circa 2012 had navigation take like 5-10 seconds.
Ben Horowitz recalled asking Zuck what his engineer onboarding process was when the latter complained to him about how it took them very long to make changes to code. He basically didn't have any.
The "very often" part is wild to me. You'd think being an engineer himself[0] he'd fix the root cause: the testing process, not work as an IC QA himself.
[0] He holds the title of Chief Engineer at SpaceX.
anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience.
Go ahead, try to delete the useless Microsoft Edge browser if you're not in a select few EU countries.
In my experience, you can't do it cleanly. Asking LLMs will tell you the following:
1)Modify a certain registry key to enable deletion. Which I did, but the only thing that accomplished is un-gray the delete button in the Control Panel. Once you press it nothing happens.
2)Windows will eventually reinstall Edge. So you're basically screwed.
People will just forge IDs with LLMs. This measure is basically unenforceable, and wastes everyone's time and money.
A), which is the status quo. I don't see any other option as realistic.
B) makes things worse in several ways, but primarily by stifling innovation. Only large incumbents will have no trouble paying for the measures required to ensure compliance.
There's also the cost of enforcement, which will likely have to be borne by the taxpayers. I don't think this is a good thing to spend money on.
C) cannot be enforced, and any good faith attempts will cost more than the damage from harm they're supposed to prevent.
It's because there's a built-in conflict of interest in most for-profit companies.
It's in a business' best interest to maximize demand for its products. Which is mostly fine for society, country, and the world by large if you're selling paper cups.
However, if you want to sell more weapons you are interested in lobbying for events that increase the consumption of weapons, in other words: wars.
See the problem yet?
many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them.
It's not "people". One half of all people grows up playing contact sports or at least have some form of rough-and-tumble with their homies in schoolyards. This half also knows that you can get punched if things get too rowdy.
The other does not. Almost all of the entitled road blockers are in this category.
Andreessen Horowitz was a major backer of Slack's predecessor, Tiny Speck, which was originally building a game called Glitch.
When Glitch failed in 2012, founder Stewart Butterfield offered to return the remaining $6 million to investors. Ben Horowitz instead encouraged Butterfield to pivot and build out the internal communication tool the team had developed for themselves, which eventually became Slack.
I saw an interview (don't have the link at hand unfortunately) where Horowitz said he didn't much care for the $6M as he had already been set at that point moneywise, and essentially wanted to gamble on an off chance Slack succeeds.
Horowitz continued to support the company through its rapid growth and eventual direct public offering (DPO) in 2019.
"average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
As was foretold in the Tyler Cowen's eponymous 2013 book "Average Is Over".
In it he argued that the modern economy will undergo a permanent shift where "average" performance no longer guarantees a stable, middle-class life.
He predicted that the economy will split into two distinct classes: a high-earning elite (roughly 10–15% of the population) who thrive by collaborating with technology, and a larger group (85–90%) facing stagnant wages and fewer opportunities.
AI summary of the other key points of that book:
The "Man + Machine" Advantage: Success will belong to those who can effectively use smart machines. Cowen uses Freestyle Chess (teams of humans and computers) as an analogy, noting that human intuition combined with machine processing power consistently outperforms either working alone.
The Power of Conscientiousness: In a world of abundant information, the scarcest and most valuable traits will be self-motivation, discipline, and the ability to focus. Hyper-Meritocracy: Advanced data and machine intelligence make it easier for employers to measure an individual's exact economic value. This leads to extreme salary inequality as top performers are identified and rewarded more precisely.
A New Social Contract: Cowen predicts a future where individuals must be more self-reliant. He suggests society will move toward lower-cost living models for the non-elite, featuring cheaper housing and "bread and circuses" in the form of low-cost digital entertainment and online education.
EDIT: Notice how we're basically already here: Netflix is cheap, YT is free, Khan Academy and MIT OCW is free, Coursera/Udemy/etc. are cheap.
Stagnant vs. Dynamic Sectors: The economic divide is worsened by "low accountability" sectors like education and healthcare, where productivity is hard to measure and costs continue to rise, unlike tech-driven sectors that see rapid gains.
I have found a bigger context window qute useful when trying to make sense of larger codebases. Generating documentation on how different components interact is better than nothing, especially if the code has poor test coverage.
I've also had it succeed in attempts to identify some non-trivial bugs that spanned multiple modules.
"They lost a large chunk of land"
I've asked Gemini. Interestingly, they were offered over 2x as much territory in exchange for 1.5% of their land. Curiously, Wikipedia doesn't mention that in the Winter War article.
They lost 10-11% after WW2. Which deal was better?
"every male still needs to spend one year of their life"
Not 1 year. Gemini says it's 6-12 months, and several European countries not bordering the big bad fit that criteria.
Who exactly is after Austria, which has conscription, but has been neutral since basically the entire cold war?
Or the famously neutral Switzerland?
"No, it hasn’t."
Top Export Partners (2019)
The total value of Finnish goods exports in 2019 was approximately $72.84 billion.
1. Germany: $10.44 billion (14.33% share)
2. Sweden: $7.47 billion (10.26% share)
3. United States: $5.20 billion (7.14% share)
4. Netherlands: $4.34 billion (5.95% share)
5. Russia: $4.02 billion (5.51% share)
6. China: $3.84 billion (5.28% share)
Top Import Partners (2019)
1. Germany: $11.42 billion (15.49% share)
2. Russia: $10.01 billion (13.57% share)
3. Sweden: $8.16 billion (11.06% share)
4. China: $5.49 billion (7.45% share)
5. Netherlands: $3.29 billion (4.46% share)
6. United States: $2.48 billion (3.37% share)
Nominal GDP per Capita in 2019 (2019 US dollars):
United States: $65,281
Finland: $48,629
Germany: $46,793
Yep, didn't work out well at all.